MS Access: fancy InStr function

I want to compare the installed packages between a couple of Linux servers. Obviously, using a database comes to mind. And my Office Pro includes a pretty good database: MS Access.

The problem

I have tables with a list of Linux packages installed on several servers, one table per server. I want a table with all the packages common to all servers, and for each package (ex: audit-libs-python-1.8-2.el5), the package root (audit-libs-python) and the version (1.8-2.el5).

Step 1: selecting the common packages

Step 2: extracting the package root and version

Package versions are not always written in a similar way. Some examples:Package Root Versionanacron-2.3-45.el5 anacron 2.3-45.el5aspell-en-6.0-3 aspell-en 6.0-3bzip2-1.0.3-6.el5_5 bzip2 1.0.3-6.el5_5db4-4.3.29-10.el5_5.2 db4 4.3.29-10.el5_5.2

However, the version starts with an hyphen (-) followed by a digit (0 to 9). Unfortunately, MS Access doesn't allow the use of Regex (regular expressions).
To overcome this, I replaced all digits by a special character (#) and then searched for the position of "-#"; the substring before this position is the package root, the one after is the version.